Half A Heart
by Wee Bookworm
Summary: She was released three years ago, she's rebuilt her life, she's moved on. But a face from the past forces her to evaluate whether this is the life she wants to live.


**This is my first attempt at Orange is the New Black fanfiction - and while I have watched most of season 1 I haven't watched beyond that yet. I am also British so I apologise for any British spellings etc that may slip through.**

There were times that Piper could forget that she was an ex-con. It had been three years since she had worn the label of prisoner, and she had worked hard to slip away from that identity. It hadn't been easy in those early weeks and months. She had tried to fit back in to the life she had left behind, before decided it was too difficult. She had changed in the eyes of those she had once surrounded herself with, and in the end she found she needed a fresh start.

It was that decision that had led her here. Working in an office in the middle of a small town that could only be described as ordinary. There was little in the way of excitement associated with her new life but it was safe.

To begin with she had needed that. She was no longer Chapman here, and there were very few people who knew about her time on the inside. In fact she was no longer Chapman at all. Within weeks of arriving here, with only a few possessions to her name, she had found herself forming a relationship with a man who had grown up within the town's boundaries. She had asked him early on why he had never left, and he had simply shrugged his shoulders. It was one of the things about this place, those who were born here, rarely seemed to leave.

She had married him on the two year anniversary of getting out of jail. It had seemed strange to her at first, the suggestion of this date but he hadn't known of its significance to her then. He knew part of her story, it had been impossible to keep it from him, but he had cared little. He had seen the parts of her that he wanted too, giving her some clichéd line about baggage. She knew there were no skeletons littering his closet, but then again she had enough for the both of them.

Still they had a life together that people envied – or at least they did on the surface. She was sure the women she called friends bitched about her behind her back. But it didn't matter really, she had found herself living in a house far nicer than she deserved. A proper family house that little girls were meant to fantasise about complete with white picket fence and perfectly level green grass. It was something of a lie though – scratch the surface and things were never quite what they seemed. Nevertheless, this house was hers, and in it she lived with the man she had pledged the rest of her life too.

He was the sort of man that parents desperately hoped would marry their daughters. He was normal, worked hard and, she had to admit, perfectly good looking. There was little about him of note. In truth, though she rarely allowed herself to admit it, he was a little boring. He didn't give her much of a thrill. There was no danger, no mystery in their lives together. She could reel off without any thought what their days would entail. She tried to close off her mind to the ideas of what could have been. The life that she had once lived, and could have experienced again had things not panned out the way they did.

She tried to block out the thoughts of her previous relationships entirely. Her husband knew only scant details – she had previously been engaged, she had travelled with a previous partner. She never told anything specific. It was easier that way. She kept the thoughts buried deep in her mind, pressed in to the little box that stored all of the memories that she wanted to suppress.

She found they would creep out in the dark of the night, infiltrating her dreams until she was forced awake, her breathing ragged. She told her husband it was nightmares, hangovers from her days in a cell with no windows. She never told him what had led to her incarceration, nor did he know the reasons that had left her in solitary – but he was forced to deal with the consequences.

He had been good to her, helping her to build her reputation here. At the beginning of their relationship, she had worked numerous small jobs trying to scrap together enough to cover the bare essentials. He had helped her to secure this job, allowing her a degree of independence. He earned enough to easily support them, but he understood her well enough to know that she needed a job. She needed the distraction that working would bring.

She struggled to deal with empty hours. It was one of the biggest struggles she'd had when she'd first been released. She had missed the routine, of having orders barked at her. She had forced herself to fill each and every hour that she had to herself with some activity or another until she had come to the conclusion that she was going to end up ill or injured. She pushed herself too hard, not wanting to think. She had spent money like water in her pursuit of outracing her thoughts, but as it turned out that was near impossible.

It was easier now though. She concentrated on the menial tasks of her job, fingers dancing over the keyboard, eyes fixed firmly on the computer screen. She had one of the better records of her colleagues. But there were days like today when she couldn't do that. Days when the workload was less than normal. She could hear the idle gossip of her colleagues at the desks behind her. They gossiped a lot of the time but today it was more evident. Like her, they had worked through everything they had to do but nobody dared to leave early.

It was days like this that she found herself having to battle to keep her mind in the present. Her dreams had been worse over these last few weeks, and this lull in her waking hour activity was making it harder to fight her subconscious in the day. She knew it was because her body was under more stress. She was more exhausted than she had ever been, both mentally and physically and that left her so much less able to fight the battle.

She raised her gaze from the computer screen. She had been staring at her inbox for far too long hoping that an e-mail would appear, giving her something to deal with. Now she found herself staring out in to the street. When she had first started working here, she had found it strange that the office was situated at street level with such a large front window. It had previous been a shop of some sort and the owner had never bothered to spend the money changing the front to something more fitting. Now she had grown used to it, and sometimes when she needed to distract herself she found herself watching the people that would walk past the window, trying to figure out their stories.

It was a distraction that only worked for a short time. She would find herself growing bored, particularly as there were very few people of interest that visited this place. Occasionally there would be a questionably dressed teenager and she would wonder where they were going clothed in such a way and what on earth had actually possessed them to think that outfit was suitable to wear outside or a mother scolding a child for some behaviour she had not witnessed – leaving her to guess just what the youngster had done.

But today it just seemed to be the same people she saw. People she would smile and wave at when she was with her husband, people who had known him since the day he – or they –were born. In a place like this everybody knew each other.

Her eyes wandered slightly, moving from her midline view to slightly over to the right, catching a glimpse of a figure walking towards the office. She swallowed hard as a bubble of nausea rose up her throat. It was not the nausea she had grown accustomed too. Her stomach twisted, and she had to remind her body that she needed to draw oxygen in to her lungs.

Now she wanted nothing more than to turn away from the window, to look at the faces of her colleagues or back down at her empty inbox. No, she draws a ragged breath, her inbox is no longer empty as somewhere her mind registers the bleep that informs her that a new message has arrived but try as she might she cannot look down.

Somewhere at the edges of her world, she can hear a voice – or perhaps voices – calling her name. She tries to respond but her voice no longer seems to be working. In fact nothing seems to feel right anymore. She is aware of the movement of her chest rising and falling, but she doesn't feel like she is breathing at all. Everything seems hazy, bar one area of her vision which is crystal clear. She is blinkered to this one sight and everything beyond that has disappeared to her.

And then her vision widens once more and it is no longer the street she sees but rather the faces of her colleagues looking down at her. They looked concerned. Someone is pressing a cup of water in to her hand and urging her to drink, another is asking when she last ate. She wants nothing more than to scream at them, to ask why they are concerned about such trivial things.

She tries to look passed them, out of the large window but there is no longer anything to see. The people passing by have changed from those who were there before, and yet they are not so different at all. No, she shakes her head, there is one difference. There is a figure missing. The one that had caught her attention and held it. The one that had caused the reaction in her body.

They are telling her that she fainted, and that she should get herself checked out at the hospital but she shakes her head once again. She knows they will try to convince her that she didn't see anything and she would like to accept that, to believe that it was merely a figment of her unconscious mind. They would smile at her in that way that they have, and tell her that it is quite normal for the brain to do this.

But she isn't so distrusting of herself to believe it. She has had this happened before, and her body didn't react in the same way. Certainly it reacted but it was only for the most fleeting of moments before realisation had dawned on her. This time she could still feel it in the quickened beat of her heart. There was not the feeling of disappointment mixed with relief as she realised that she had been mistaken. She knows they will start to think her quite mad, that she is believing what she saw in the time she was unconscious, but she is certain that the world slipped away after she had seen and not before.

She closes her eyes for a second, trying to give herself a moment to catch up with everything. It has only been a matter of minutes, and yet a lifetime seems to have passed her by. She hears the flurry of activity around her, and quickly opens her eyes and tries to flash a look that tells the older women she is fine, that she didn't slip away from them once again. She doesn't want them to take her to the hospital, she doesn't want to have to explain this to her husband. She knows they question this behaviour, and they will mention it too him but she can argue it was nothing more than a fainting spell and that she felt fine after. Even if it is not the truth, this was not a physical problem that a doctor could fix.

There was no cure for this. She curled her toes inside of her shoe, forcing herself to count to ten to drive to regain her self-control.

"I just need some air," she says the words shakily, and forces herself upwards. Someone wraps an arm around her, a motherly gesture and supports her as she walks towards the door. Together they step out on to the street, and she forces herself to make a show of gulping in lungfuls of the fresh air as she looks around for any sign of the person. But they are long gone from the street. There is no trace of their presence, and she says a silent prayer. Though she isn't quite certain whether it's for them to have disappeared from her life again – allowing her to pretend that it was just a false alarm no matter what her body says or whether it's for their paths to cross once more.


End file.
